Careful Not to Choke
by countessofbiscuit
Summary: Upon his return from Saleucami, Captain Rex loses his breath twice in a standard minute. Uh, Anakin, your Sith is showing. Post-Episode: s02ep10 "The Deserter" (Anakin & Rex, Rex/Ahsoka)


(I came across this *ahem* gripping concept in a rough sketch by Lledra titled "Anakin's Anger - Rough" and ran with it to angst hell. Anakin's lines are from that sketch so all credit for that bit goes to Lledra: .com(slash)post(slash)35298016352(slash)anakins-anger-rough)

This fic features Sithly and possessive behavior, some language, and a teenaged character. DLDR.

* * *

Rex would later wonder if she'd felt him.

Her Master, that is. Surely he'd be hard to miss. His physical presence alone had a sort of gravity to it, whether planted like a Therangen column to the _Resolute_ 's durasteel floor or drawing droids and their blaster fire towards him in a consuming wave of destruction from one alien hellscape to the next.

Whatever the Force felt like, Rex guessed it must quiver every time General Skywalker drew breath.

So maybe she had, maybe she hadn't. Maybe she'd been just as distracted⏤

 _Knock it off, you barve. This is no time for self-congratulation._

Rex was lying on his unforgiving bunk and, in a repetitive ritual, passed a shaky hand from his throat⏤bruised? hard to tell just yet⏤down to his freakishly erect dick and back up over his eyes, pressing hard as if to expunge the whole karkin' episode from his overstimulated mind.

The longnecks called it "vat fever" and would have just pulled the plugs for an hour. Now the closest Rex could come to such disinterested care was a bottle of Kowakian rum he'd officially confiscated from Hardcase. But he'd only cited 'Regs', not 'Regulations', which in Torrent-speak had meant that he unofficially intended to give it back. Opening the bottle now would mean being harassed from hell to breakfast for an explanation that would mollify the men's collective conviction of _theft_ and silence any speculation (probably originating with Fives).

There would be no explanation. So Rex rolled onto his side, towards the stark wall and away from the bottle, and shoved his hands between his firm thighs in an attempt to quiet them.

Quieting his head was another kettle of stinkfish. He'd always entertained a low opinion of the Kaminoan's vaunted mastery of superfine genetic tinkering. All this fekkin' brain activity couldn't be healthy, even for a moderately upgraded grunt. (The hair thing was, at least, an aberration he'd come to appreciate. So did she apparently.)

For the hundredth time that standard hour, Rex was subjected to a hyperreal play-by-play of the _incident_.

The blaster burn. Searing agony. Darkness. Kix.

The deser⏤no, Cut. _Cut Lawquane_. His name counts and his choice matters. Maybe not as much as the Republic or the Jedi or his Brothers, but at least his dereliction of duty tends towards the neglectful rather than the traitorous. He's no Slick.

But then it just spills out: "My family is elsewhere." He can't remember ever using that word before. "Brothers," yeah. But "Family"? That's… funny.

That loping eopie, making towards the sunset about as fast as an AT-TE with sand in its servos. A larty scoops him up in the end. They never show that in the holofilms.

The welcoming _thunk!_ of boots on the hangar floor and it's goodbye Saleucami, hello… home? That feels right, for a change.

Protracted salutes and double-takes. Oh yeah. The scorched scar right around where basic anatomy says his heart should be. He can already hear QM's whistle of disbelief as he turns for the stores. Kix can wait, new plates first.

A subsidiary corridor, a shortcut, yet there she is, his Commander, skipping deliberately towards him like she's been expecting him to amble⏤out of a thousand passageways⏤down that one in particular.

"Rex!"

It's more a gasp than a greeting and she's on him in a hot second. Her sienna hands are instantly over the singed cavity as if to try something, as if to _touch_ , only to reconsider. Unexpected disappointment bleeds somewhere close to the wound he thought he couldn't feel anymore. But she does one better and takes his gloved hand with a squeeze, like she means something by it.

He's so busy looking down he almost misses the glaze in her blue eyes⏤or is she decidedly avoiding his? They are both… weirdly spacey.

"Anakin said you were alright, but _son of a Sith_." (Too much time around the men or her master?!)

"You know it'd take more than a Seppie sniper to snuff me, sir." He presses her hand in return. Her Togrutan temperature runs high and it's warming the neoprene and that's making him warmer still.

"I'm just… glad you're back," she says.

If an idea could tickle his brain, well, he feels it in that moment. Right behind his left ear to be precise. *Bend down*. But of all the dancing mynocks.

He remains at parade rest. Or nearly. His commander is holding his hand after all, it's getting soggy, and they are _definitely_ slipping into regs-not-regulations space.

Especially when frustration seems to get the better of her and she drops his hand to wrap herself around his plastoid middle. Now he's really sweating like a dewback even though he's sure his vitals flatlined moments ago.

Sure, the General's eccentric Padawan was emotive and handsy, with none of the reserve he'd seen in other Jedi. Chip off the old block⏤probably some species trait too. But collapsing on a trooper because a Kaminoan chestplate was _somehow_ the softest surface around (right, he isn't sure how to requisition Jedi garb but some shiny was getting (1) Padawan robe added to their full battle rattle from now on) wasn't really deliberate.

This is. And what's worse, he wants to hug her back … and oh hells, he can feel that same mooney smile Cut wore at the dinner table tugging at his cheeks.

Blast it all.

He bends down.

His hands trail up her arms, following the warmth under her headtails to rest on her shoulders, and his nose nudges against beads in the wide groove between her montrals, inhaling whiffs of vanillin and burnt cabling in equal measure. As affection goes it's a little like bumping 'braces, but just when he's thinking about maybe finding out what vanillin and singed rubber _tastes_ like⏤

 _*beep*beep*beep*beep*_

… aaaand the cheeky Jedi's engaged it for him and she's probably about to deliver some shiny imitation of Kamando'a when Kix's acidly cheerful voice comes over the comm.

 _"So, Captain, Blackout tells me you've been shipside ten minutes and your sorry shebs still haven't darkened my door. Frankly, sir, if I find you with those fucking box kickers ogling a new set of tits before you've⏤"_

 _*BWOOOP*_

Kix, you brass-faced _shabiir_.

She's cackling into his chest and he's laughing too and okay, _ow ow OW_ , now he's feeling the frayed flesh again.

"Better not keep the doctor waiting, Rexster," she grins, unwrapping herself from his midsection.

"Yes, sir." He squeezes her fingers with one hand, salutes with the other, and starts to retrace his steps. "Oh, and, Commander… about Kix… no repeating any of that in front of the Generals, eh?"

She makes an exaggerated swiping and keycode gesture across her mouth and darts away.

He's only just replaced his bucket and about-faced when he hears it. The determined footfall of the General… who's suddenly beside him. Kriff.

"Captain."

"General Skywalker⏤"

"Can I have a word."

Again it's more a statement than a question and oh boy, Kix is in for it, and as Kix's CO he's in for it too. ( _"Yes, sir, once he's dropped the hypo I'll personally wash the chizsk's mouth out with lye, you'll never hear another foul word from his pretty lips, sir."_ )

"Of course, sir!"

There's the General's weird gravity again because suddenly his back's up against a wall he didn't know was there and yeah, Skywalker's tall, but _looming_? Not usually.

"I'm going to ask you something simple."

"Sir⏤"

 _WHHUUUUUMPH._

Someone's opened an airlock.

At least, that's what it sounds like.

His lungs are collapsing. Vacuums don't kriffing work like that. Why isn't his helmet functioning? Shabla longneck tech! Is there a fucking rancor stepping on his throat?!

Seven Sith hells. _Ventress_. The bogwitch is back.

He can't hear anything and everything's going red around the edges, including the General⏤

"WHAT⏤"

 _WHUMPH_.

The General. Fuck.

"DO YOU THINK⏤"

 _HUCK. HUCK_. He knows, he knows, he knows _it doesn't kriffing work_ 'cause he tried it last time but instinct is still telling him to scrabble like a hawkbat for purchase against the invisible vice around his pipes. _HUCK_.

"YOU ARE DOING⏤"

So, he can hear. He can always hear that voice. But this is some _dar'jetii_ trick. Sensory madness by elevated asphyxiation. _HUCK_.

"WITH MY⏤"

 _CRACKKKK!_

Bone and plastoid meet durasteel at what feels like 10 Sirparian g's and he's gonna need more than a new chestplate now.

"PADAWAN!"

He's hacking up a lung and it _fucking hurts_. There are drops of blood on the floor. _Little cosmic wonder._ He hadn't lost consciousness playing hangman with a Sith but he's gonna black out with this incessant coughing and the lacerating pain in his chest for sure⏤

 _Fuck this helmet!_

It's off. It's off, it's off and his eyes are watering like a vat that's sprung a leak, but there's no trickery now, no HUD gone haywire to explain why he sees no one but the General marching off down the corridor, black letheris tails whipping up a storm behind him.

Padawan.

Padawan.

 _Padawan._

Rex still hadn't seen Kix.

Once he'd caught his breath, he'd popped his bucket back on⏤captains don't get caught crying and they definitely don't get caught being strangled by their Generals⏤and hightailed it to his cabin down even more subsidiary corridors.

More than one trooper had tried to restrain him while comming for a medic when they saw a bloodied captain rounding a corner at a dead sprint. Hah! You didn't win 'Most Likely to Outrun a Jedi' among a batch of genetically-identical supersoldiers by letting a superated rifle wound to the thoracic cavity and a shaken belief in your commanding officer slow you down. Despite the scenic route, Rex had made it back to his cabin ten standard seconds before passing out, ready to finally take Cody's sarcastic advice to "Trust the Force, Rex ol' boy" and leave his survival or demise to… well, someone else.

It had worked up to the point where he woke up spluttering and hacking in a cold sweat an hour later desperately needing to take a leak.

So.

Skywalker (!). Commander Tano. Saluecami. Vanillin and silka beads...

And how Rex came to be palming himself to distraction and deciding he probably wouldn't even make it to breakfast so, fuck it, he'd chug Hardcase's rum⏤

Someone knocked on his door. No matter who it was, it wouldn't be good. Definitely not now and _never_ at stupid dark thirty.

"Rex."

Sithspit. The General.

It was an understatement to say he had a bad feeling about this. Rex had had little experience of Padawans outside the Commander, and if the longnecks really had left "Subsection P: Padawan Etiquette" out of the _How to Dutifully Serve under Powerful Space Monks Who Will Ring You Like a Gorg If You Hug Smaller Monks_ , well. Manufacturer's error.

Rex rubbed his hands over his unkempt face, tapped open the door, and was met by a face that looked just as awful and deflated as his.

"Hey Rex. May I, uh, come in?"

"Certainly sir."

Skywalker eased past Rex, deliberately, like an apex predator determined to appear unthreatening, but then he nonchalantly waved the door shut behind him which only heightened the anxiety of a spooked man stuck in a small space with a Force-user.

Which of course the Force-user could probably sense in a mynock minute.

"There's no two ways about this, Rex," sighed the General as he slid down the opposite wall onto the floor and wrapped his hands round his skull. "I've been a real piece of bantha-shit."

Would it be too much insubordination for one day to politely disagree? Or would he be doing the hangman's jig again if he did what he actually wanted to do and heartily concurred with some choice words from Kix's colorful vocabulary? Rex held his tongue and just slumped down onto his cot. If Skywalker was still feeling… _off_ , better let him right his vectors with little or no interference. Let him vent.

But then the General lifted his head and pierced him with a look so profoundly contrite, Rex actually pitied General Kenobi. Raising this guy must have been like rearing a baleful tusk cat cub prone to upending fine Christophsian tea sets on a good day and raising general hell if you had the misfortune to step on its tail.

"I'm so so _sorry_ ," said Skywalker (and it was probably 'the Force' conveniently playing on his analogy, but Rex swore he _purred_ ). "And I know you probably wanna be on the other side of the galaxy right now than listen to this sleemo apologize, but please Rex. Please. If it'll keep you with the 501st, with the men and the _Commander_ who need you, I'll put into the Council for a transfer right now. Right this fekkin' minute."

There was more sincerity in that speech that Rex could swallow. They had to lighten the mood or he was going to have trouble breathing again.

"Well sir, I'm not sure who would take you," Rex chuckled.

"I'm being serious, Rex."

"So am I." And Rex levelled his Jedi with a knowing look that said while the spukama may be out of the sack now, Rex was holding it firmly by the neck and wasn't above either drowning it or letting it loose in the Council Chamber, depending on how this heart-to-heart played out.

He also hoped to convey some small measure of the devastating disappointment that had been stinging his eyes ever since seeing the General again, but if he held the stare too much longer he really would start spluttering like a tank-ducked cadet.

His Jedi... _dark_? It was a concept he was only familiar with as a linguistic remnant of Mandalore's perverse history with the Jedi, something as abstract and impossible as betraying his brothers, breathing in space, or waking up Force-sensitive one fine morning. It went against everything he knew of the Jedi, let alone _Skywalker_ , ballsy junk-shop slave turned Hero of the Republic. Yet there was no denying, between the cracked pieces of plastoid tossed in the corner and Rex's tender throat, that the General's power could… short-circuit.

Still.

He'd _lived_. And Rex could add walking-guilt-trip to his many unofficial GAR duties, maybe shame the General into never snapping like that again. Loyalty was the best policy, after all, and it'd take more than some unfortunate Force accident before he'd forsake his code and take up _farming_.

"Besides," continued Rex, softening a little, "you're the best bolo-ball ref in the entire GAR. Cody's a damn cheater, he'll be off his chain if you reassign yourself to some backwater sector."

Result: the smile that reigned over the Coruscant holonews and⏤if Fox and his all-seeing band of blather-buckets was to be believed⏤had already knocked one upright Senator clean off her feet.

"Cody is a sharpie, isn't he," the General replied, trailing off with a vacant grin. Then his eyes lit upon the flimsy bandage Rex had half-heartedly plastered over the much larger mess of singed blacks, dried blood, and torn flesh on his chest, and with unnerving speed, he was off the floor and on the cot, picking gingerly at the corners of the gauze.

"Fekkin' hells, Rex, has nobody treated this?"

"Not since Kix laid me up in that barn. And in the meantime I've fought off a platoon of commando droids and been tossed around like gullipud."

The General winced⏤at the accusation or the sight of serrated flesh, Rex didn't know.

"Well," Skywalker began, "I can't… change what happened⏤what I did. But I can fix this, if you'll let me?"

That baleful face again. _Damn_. Rex eyed Hardcase's rum across the cabin. "Uh, will I need some of that first?"

Skywalker looked over his shoulder at the bottle. "Nice! But no, if I do this right, you shouldn't feel a thing."

Rex didn't want to insult the General by questioning how often _didn't_ get this right, and although he would have preferred to just take some generous swigs of rum, douse the wound with the rest, and rack out, he nodded his agreement. And as the General peeled the bandage off his blacks and hovered his flesh hand above the bloodied mess, curiosity got the better of Rex's concern about being subjected to another one of Skywalker's Force tricks.

A fluttering developed somewhere deep in his left breast, as if anti-grav butterflies had escaped his stomach and were dancing around his heart instead. It grew more intense as the General closed his eyes, and yeah, Rex could definitely _feel_ something, but it was just bizarre, not uncomfortable, and the nettling pain he'd lived with for however many standard hours now started to subside. He watched Skywalker's brow crease, the set of his jaw harden, and his arm tense up as he concentrated on… whatever he was doing.

Some black dust puffed out of Rex's chest and with a mixture of awe and disgust he watched it filter through Skywalker's fingers and drift upwards past his head. He was startled out of this bewildered reverie when the General spoke abruptly. "Ahsoka?"

 _Blast, not her too._

Rex glanced at the door, wondering if Skywalker had sensed her approach, but he noticed that the General was looking in the opposite direction, eyes raised and head cocked at a slight angle over his right shoulder, as if listening to a frequency in the air only he could detect. The General looked back at his hand above Rex's heart and then to the right again in a manner that said his senses were confused.

"Something wrong, sir?" asked Rex.

Skywalker didn't answer, just beetled his brows again as he scrutinized Rex's chest. The fluttering quickened again and Rex swore he caught of a whiff of vanillin before the General shook his head with a grin, as if suddenly realizing something obvious. Wierd.

"No," he said, meeting Rex's concerned stare with a smile that wrinkled the corners of his blue eyes, "everything's good."

Immediately the fluttering in Rex's chest faded into a dull tightening, presumably as layers of muscle and flesh were magically repaired. To confirm his hunch, Rex tucked his chin and tugged the singed edges of the neoprene in a circle to get a better look⏤sure enough, where there was once a nasty, dark wound, now only an irregular patch of pocked scar tissue testified to his latest brush with death.

If you scrambled the corridor incident.

"Sorry about the scarring. I, uh, kinda had a crash course in Force-healing. Obi-Wan could probably smooth it up for you," said Skywalker.

"Nah, I like your handiwork, sir."

The General scoffed as he leant back against the adjoining wall, one foot drawn up underneath him with the other leg dangling off the cot. He spied the rum again on the table in the corner, extended his hand, and levitated the bottle across the cabin.

"Where'd you get this, Rex?" the General asked as he swiped it out of the air and turned it over in his hands. He uncorked the bottle and sniffed. "Another one of your tactical acquisitions?"

"Pfft, no. Confiscated."

"I see. And to which one of our lawless troopers do we owe this drink?"

Rex wasn't about to compound theft with snitching. "Afraid I couldn't say, sir."

"Uh-huh. Well, to friends then?" was Skywalker's toast as he smiled expectantly at Rex.

"To _family_." It felt right. For a change.

"Even better. And to forgetting today tonight!" Skywalker continued before bringing the bottle to his lips and guzzling enough alcohol to drown a bantha.

 _Who taught this guy how to drink?!_ "Sir⏤"

Too late. Rum and spittle flecked Rex's face as Skywalker gagged and spluttered next to him like he'd taken an unexpected dive on an aiwha. He beat his chest with his mechno-arm and bent double in a fit, nearly spilling the bottle in his other hand onto the cot.

But before another accident that would have seen Rex's night go from weird to wet, he snatched up the bottle and relaxed onto the wall behind him, smiling smugly to himself as he took one long and overdue swill and watched Skywalker cough for the Republic.


End file.
